Though all that glitters is not gold, the precious metal will invade the City of Lights this fall in the form of an Incan art exhibit at Paris’s Pinacothèque.
The exhibit will allow visitors to understand the Incas’ relationship with gold, which was found in large quantities in South America to the great delight of the era’s Spanish explorers.
Peruvian museums, including the National Archaological Museum in Lima, are lending Precolombian works to the exhibit. A total of 253 works showing the rich heritage of the Incas will be presented, who reigned without mercy on the Andean mountains between 1400 and 1533, the year the Conquistadores swept the civilization from their colonial path.
Though there were many such objects during the period, they’re now rare, since the Spanish invaders melted down almost everything they found in order to drag the Incas’ riches back to Spain.
The exhibit will take place in Paris from September 10 2010 to February 6 2011.